Intellectual Development Linked to Quality of Day Care

New findings from an ongoing seven-year study offer reassurance for
working parents: Day care, by itself, does not harm the intellectual
development of children.

More important than the number of hours children spend in day care,
the national study found, is the quality of care that infants and
toddlers receive. Children whose caregivers respond and speak
frequently to them learn to think and speak better than children in
day-care settings with less warmth and verbal interaction.

But the researchers, working under the auspices of the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development, also found one
drawback to putting infants in child care. The more hours that infants
ages 6 months and younger spent away from their mothers, the less
sensitive their mothers were to them as the children grew older. But
the researchers said this effect was weak compared with their findings
about quality of care.

"It was not enough to make a sensitive mother insensitive or to make
an engaged mother disengaged," said Robert Pianta, an associate
professor education at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
"We're talking about moving a mother and child a little more on a
continuum."

Array of Settings

Mr. Pianta is one of 29 investigators working on the study, which
was launched by the NICHD, a part of the National Institutes of Health,
in 1991 at a cost of $30 million. The researchers are tracking the
progress of 1,394 children from 10 sites around the nation from shortly
after the children were born until they reach 1st grade.

The families in the study are diverse, both in socioeconomic
background and choice of child care. The study included children who
were cared for by mothers, fathers, grandparents, nannies, family
day-care providers, and workers at child-care centers.

In their first progress report last year, the researchers concluded
that, at 15 months of age, children in child care were no less
emotionally attached to their mothers than those who stayed with their
mothers at home.

Their new findings, presented here April 3 during the biennial
meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, are for
children up to age 3. They focus on speaking and thinking skills and on
the quality of children's relationships with their mothers.

The issue of whether day care is harmful to children's well-being
has been a hot topic in recent years, given the increasingly larger
percentage of mothers in the nation's workforce. In 1980, 38 percent of
all mothers with children younger than age 1 worked outside the home.
Now, half of all women with infants work and most of these women return
to work before their children are 6 months old.

A number of other studies have weighed in on the subject, with mixed
conclusions. But the NICHD study is the largest and most comprehensive
to date.

"Almost all of the other studies have taken children from within
child-care centers. We sampled children at birth and followed them over
time, so we're seeing a different package," said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a
psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who is also
on the study team.

Measuring Quality

Investigators on the project tested children and interviewed their
families when the children were 6, 15, 24, and 36 months old. At the
same intervals, they also videotaped interactions between mothers and
their children and observed children in their day-care settings,
counting the number of times, for example, that caregivers praised or
talked to the children.

The research team defined "more positive child-care environments" as
those where caregivers were more attentive and affectionate toward
children, responding to their vocalizations, asking them questions, and
talking to them.

Researchers said children in those high-quality environments
performed better on cognitive and language tests at 15, 24, and 36
months of age. More positive caregiving also seemed to affect
children's relationships with their mothers, resulting in mothers who
were more sensitive and involved with their children at 15 and 36
months.

Also, "when different types of care were equivalent, children in
centers performed better on language and cognitive tests than children
in other kinds of care," added Aletha Huston, a professor of child
development at the University of Texas at Austin and a study
investigator.

The small negative effects of too many hours of child care on the
relationship between mothers and their children also showed up across
the children's first three years of life--particularly among mothers
who were not poor or suffering from depression.

When their children were 6 and 36 months old, mothers whose infants
had spent the most hours in child care were deemed less sensitive to
their children. The researchers made these judgments based on the
videotaped sessions, noting, for example, when mothers did not respond
to their children or intruded on their play. At 15 months, the mothers
acted more negatively toward the children, according to the report.

Likewise, those children were less affectionate toward their mothers
at 12 and 36 months of age.

But the researchers cautioned that their findings should be put in
context. Although the quality of children's care clearly mattered, it
mattered less than some other factors, such as their families' economic
and emotional environment, their mothers' mental health, and their own
temperaments.

For More Information:

Information on the study is available from the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, 31 Center Drive, 9000 Rockville
Pike, Mail Stop 2425, Room 2A32, Bethesda, Md.